With that said, I feel that the situation with Frostman was the result of a huge misunderstanding that was completely my fault. I am also their technical support. The Memory Hole function simply did not work, and this was noted on the blog long before this situation snowballed, although it should've been made more explicitely. I specifically instructed TT bloggers to save a copy of the offending comment in their thread and delete it. After which they can send it to me , and I would manually insert it in the database (the memory hole).

This, unfortunately, gave the impression that comments were just being deleted, which is against TT policy. I am more than willing to have Frostman back if he truly respects understands the purpose of the memory hole, and why it exists, and respects the decisions of TT bloggers.

However, this had nothing to do with any dishonesty.

Guts,

Let me get this straight. You acknowledge that deleting comments is against TT policy:

Quote

This, unfortunately, gave the impression that comments were just being deleted, which is against TT policy.

And then you admit to violating that policy -- and not just temporarily:

Quote

The memory hole wasn't working for a while. It's working now, I asked that comments be deleted and saved for manual insertion. I am deleting, however, all the whining as well as my own comments.

You also acknowledge that the misunderstanding was completely your fault.

So Frostman and I were banned because

1) you created a misunderstanding that was completely your fault;2) you went on to violate TT's comment policy by deleting comments that you never placed in the Memory Hole;3) neither you nor Bradford stepped in to defuse the situation by telling us that comments were only being deleted temporarily (which, as it turns out, wouldn't have been true anyway);4) Frostman and I correctly protested the violation of TT's comment policy; and5) you and/or Bradford banned both of us, knowing the entire time that the whole situation was a "misunderstanding".

Synopsis: You and Bradford screwed up, so Frostman and I got banned.

Makes perfect sense to me.

--------------And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G

This, unfortunately, gave the impression that comments were just being deleted, which is against TT policy.

What? The comments were deleted, against TT policy --- not "gave the impression that comments were just being deleted". They were not saved. They are not there now. They are gone.

Quote (Guts @ Nov. 27 2007, 17:16)

I am more than willing to have Frostman back if he truly respects understands the purpose of the memory hole, and why it exists, and respects the decisions of TT bloggers.

Why on earth would you direct these statements toward me? By deleting comments permanently, you have shown that you do not truly respect and understand the purpose of the memory hole. Not me. You are the one who violated TT policy. Not me.

In reference to the previous analogy, it turns out the man behind the curtain was Guts, not Bradford. To Guts' credit, he wrote a contrite apology to me privately in email, acknowledging that he made a serious mistake. His private apology was nothing like the equivocal one he gave here, however.

The obvious question I asked him was, Why didn't he make an apology on TT? As a direct consequence of his mistakes, the TT members had a false impression of what happened. My conduct was entirely rational, yet since my posts were deleted, there was no record of my defense. Guts had already apologized to me privately for this. Most TT members do not frequent this thread here on antievolution.org. Why didn't Guts come clean to the readers of TT?

You won't believe what came next. Guts agreed to make such an apology --- but only on the condition that I renounce an opinion which I expressed on the TT thread! It sounds unbelievable, I know. Not only is Guts unwilling to do the right thing, but he commits extortion on top of it.

Guts wanted me to disavow my position that the Davies quote was out of context (bold mine):

Quote (Paul Davies @ NYT)

In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

After many tries, Guts was unable to understand that, in regard to atheism or "anti-theism", using only the last (non-bolded) sentence without the previous two is inappropriate. Davies is no theist, as is well known, and as the first two sentences above suggest. Quoting only the last sentence misrepresents Davies' position.

Guts did not agree. Which is fine. We are free to disagree, and we are free to debate the issue further if we so choose. Or so I thought.

As it turns out, Bradford was incredibly offended by my suggestion that the quote was out of context. Indeed, the first permanent deletion was done by Bradford (the post was not "saved" to be later inserted in the memory hole). Incidentally, it should be noted that Bradford was the first one to violate the TT deletion policy, and that action is what precipitated these events. Guts was backing up Bradford the whole way. Guts was also expressing outrage at the very idea of an out of context quote.

The interesting part is that my opinion of the quote is irrelevant. I repeatedly made clear that all I wanted was for Guts to do the right thing --- to explain the situation to the readers of TT, as he at least tried to do here. But Guts kept dodging, instead wanting to talk about the Davies quote and how my opinion is unacceptable. He would only admit his mistakes on TT if I renounced my position.

Guts then took the desperate position that it doesn't matter where he makes the apology. The following is the final unanswered email I sent to Guts:

TT readers have not been informed of what truly occurred. Some TT readers may also read AE, but many do not. The honest course of action is to tell them.

Your opinion of me and my position are unrelated to the ethical obligation in front of you. You require nothing from me in order to fulfill that obligation.

"TT readers have not been informed of what truly occurred. Some TT readers may also read AE, but many do not. The honest course of action is to tell them."

"Your opinion of me and my position are unrelated to the ethical obligation in front of you. You require nothing from me in order to fulfill that obligation."

LOL!!! Oh, goodness, Frosty! Why in the world do you think anyone at TT should be as attached to your typing as you are? There is no "ethical obligation." TT is a privately owned blog that doesn't have to let you participate at all, and may make decisions about moderation without consulting you. It's not an EEOC employer of yours, and isn't the government either. Unless you're getting paid by the post and have to produce links to them in order to get paid, you've no reason to complain.*

* And if you're getting paid per-post, we want half. §;o)

I knew the Hole was out of order, because I had to delete a post of Mark's just the week before (along with my reply). In a perfectly topical post to the subject of the thread he had inserted an accusation of sock-puppetry against a couple of our other participants, a serious no-no (as well as not true based on our stats info). Because the Hole was out of order - something about the server switchover - I simply deleted it after informing him why, then deleted that too. It didn't occur to me to make a copy to manually insert from Guts' end, so I didn't. The post simply had to go.

Mark wasn't upset about that action and didn't whine to high heaven about some non-existent "right" to have his typing etched into net-stone. He merely took up where he'd left off per the topic and there were no further issues and no hard feelings.

Just to wrap this up, I sent the following email to Mike Gene on 12/17/2007, to which there was no reply:

Hi Mike,

I just wanted to be sure that you are aware of the conditions surrounding my banishment from TT.

Not long ago there was a bit of confusion when Guts began deleting my comments permanently, against TT policy. These comments were not saved for later additions to the memory hole, as was once suggested. Guts has apologized for this publicly at antievolution.org, and privately (rather profusely) to me in email. Guts has not apologized to the TT community, however.

A brief explanation of what happened, along with Guts' apology, is here:

My banishment was not approved by the majority of TTers, as Guts has told me.

At the present moment, I am banned because I hold the view that a particular quote by Paul Davies which appeared on TT was taken out of context. This view is unacceptable to Guts, and remains the sole reason for my banning.

Each of my comments at TT has been rationally presented, in the spirit of a free exchange of ideas. You should be fully aware that TT does not support such a free exchange.

5. Keiths joined in the harrassment by restoring a comment from the memory hole.

6. Frostman and Keiths were banned.

The interesting thing about this is that I acknowledged that Frostman may have misunderstood the situation sincerely. So I offered him an opportunity to return. He said he didn't care whether or not he was banned. I'm glad he admitted that, as it shows that this is all just some martydom show. The bottom line is that, posting on TT isn't your right, it's a priviledge. Unless you want to help out with the costs ;)

As I told you at the time, I didn't restore the comment; Frostman did. And he didn't restore it from the Memory Hole. The Memory Hole was broken, remember?

Keiths, i'm looking right now at the copy of the comment of yours that I deleted. You can't even get basic facts right.

Keiths:

Quote

And by the way, you're still misspelling "martyrdom" as "martydom".

Yeah I keep leaving out the r. I'm not even sure why you're chiming in, in this situation, you look the worst, since I warned you about 5 times to get back on topic. It makes all your comments about the "martyrdom machine" rather hilarious.

We're actually revamping the way these bannings go. Since there are many authors, and each of them have different levels of tolerance, I'm making a way for each author to police their threads individually. This will probably do away with the need for complete banishment.

Keiths, i'm looking right now at the copy of the comment of yours that I deleted.

Then post it here. I know for a fact that I did not fish any comments out of the Memory Hole. You've already admitted that the Memory Hole was not working -- how could I have fished out a comment that wasn't there, even if I had wanted to?

The only way that I could have quoted a deleted comment is if you deleted it after I quoted it. Did that even occur to you?

What's amusing about this is that you've convicted yourself again. By saying that you're "looking right now" at my comment that you deleted, you've confirmed that you violated TT's policy against deleting comments without placing them in the Memory Hole. As you put it earlier:

Quote

This, unfortunately, gave the impression that comments were just being deleted, which is against TT policy.

Way to go, Marty. Is there anything else you'd like to tell us? Have you read Consilience?

(I'm still laughing about that one. You were asked at least seven times if you had read Consilience, and you avoided the question each time, starting here through the end of the thread.)

To summarize: You violated TT policy. Frostman and I pointed it out. You acknowledge it. Yet we got banned for it.

Pathetic.

--------------And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G

huh? That joke would be funnier if it lampooned the methodology accurately.

Yeah, I'm sure its much more sciency than I understand. We can give you a thread here to make your case, if you like, but it sounds like telic thoughts has boilerplate creobot 'moderation', so I wont be going there.

Then post it here. I know for a fact that I did not fish any comments out of the Memory Hole. You've already admitted that the Memory Hole was not working -- how could I have fished out a comment that wasn't there, even if I had wanted to?

Keiths, if the memory hole still wasn't working at that point (even though I said it was fixed at that point), then why are there comments by Frostman and Joy in the memory hole? ( see here http://telicthoughts.com/57/#comment-157770)

Obviously at that point, the memory hole was working, and several of Frostman's comments were sent there. You pathetically tried to fish them out.

Keiths:

Quote

The only way that I could have quoted a deleted comment is if you deleted it after I quoted it. Did that even occur to you?

Except that I didn't delete it.

Keiths:

Quote

What's amusing about this is that you've convicted yourself again. By saying that you're "looking right now" at my comment that you deleted, you've confirmed that you violated TT's policy against deleting comments without placing them in the Memory Hole.

Actually, I deleted a comment of yours because you tried to fish it out of the memory hole. This is a method used to deter anyone from doing just that. Others have been banned for doing similar things (fishing comments out of the memory hole). But anyway thats not even the reason why you were banned. As you put it earlier:

Keiths:

Quote

Way to go, Marty. Is there anything else you'd like to tell us? Have you read Consilience?

Yup, it's obvious though, that you never did. That was a funny one.

Keiths:

Quote

(I'm still laughing about that one. You were asked at least seven times if you had read Consilience, and you avoided the question each time, starting here through the end of the thread.)

I didn't avoid the question, I showed, through refuting each and every one of your points, that I had read it, and you didn't. What does scienticism mean again?

We can give you a thread here to make your case, if you like, but it sounds like telic thoughts has boilerplate creobot 'moderation', so I wont be going there.

What are you talking about? TT is crawling with critics. If getting rid of trolls like Keiths is "boilerplate creobot moderation" then so be it.

Alan fox has a neutral venue if you'd be more comfortable. My dealings with Keiths have been fine. I must be troll tolerant, or perhaps you're full of it. I can always wait for the film of the book to be on TBS, or perhaps nature will pick it up.

Actualy I am very troll tolerant, I gave Keiths chance after chance to avoid getting banned. He decided to become a cog in his own "martyrdom machine" instead.

Look at him now, he can't even get his facts straight.

Actually, I've just been reading this thread in its entirety. Doesn't bode well for telic thoughts. You can explain it here or go to Alan's neutral venue, or not, if you don't want to. But you have pretty standard creobot 'moderation' and it's a waste of any rational persons time to invest effort in dialogue that might not see the light of day.